Register for the Spring National SBIR/STTR Conference and take your pick of 1-on-1 meetings with Agency principals on a first-come, first-serve basis. More than 300 meeting slots filled in a week at last year’s conference, so don't delay. Once you register, you’ll receive access to descriptions of all 23 participating Agencies and Institutes to make your 1-on-1 meeting choices.

The conference, held at the Gaylord Convention Center in National Harbor, MD on June 16 – 18, will feature the SBA Administrator, representatives from all participating NIH institutes and key leaders from across the Federal government. The event is the nation's largest annual gathering of SBIR/STTR Agencies, industry leaders, and awardees.

The Biotechnology Industry Organization today issued the following statement in response to Senator Patrick Leahy’s announcement that he will remove current patent legislation from the Senate Judiciary Committee’s agenda for now:

“BIO applauds Chairman Leahy’s decision to remove the controversial patent bill from the Senate Judiciary Committee’s agenda until greater stakeholder consensus can be achieved.

All of us know that you have to be a little crazy to be an entrepreneur. Launching, let alone sustaining, a new enterprise can be challenging along almost every dimension − mentally, emotionally, and often financially. Historically, this reality has been even more sobering in the health care sector, where the typical hardships experienced by any start-up have been amplified by numerous industry-specific challenges: Extensive regulation, entrenched players with a strong grip on the status quo, confusing paths to entry, and an even more opaque path to payment have made health care a particularly treacherous territory for entrepreneurs.

Numerous studies have shown that Americans of European origin have a more independent, and Asians have a more interdependent, social orientation, as measured by questionnaires asking about agreement with such statements as “I feel it is important for me to act as an independent person.” But this social-orientation difference is about 6 times greater among people from both backgrounds who are carriers of two particular alleles of a dopamine-receptor gene known as DRD4, according to a team led by Shinobu Kitayama of the University of Michigan. The alleles appear to predispose people to acquire behaviors that are considered socially desirable, the researchers say.

Its no secret: the University of Colorado receives hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds that sponsor our research. My lab alone racks up expenditures of $800,000 a year to pay for post-doc and graduate student salary, tuition, materials and travel. Isn’t it preposterous to now ask the public for some more of their hard-earned cash as we, and many other universities now, do on CU Boulder’s new initiative?

It helps to first think about why the government actually does make these payments in the first place: to educate the next generation of engineers and scientists by working on research problems with important societal benefits. With this money becoming more competitive, the pool of ideas actually being supported becomes smaller with little to no feedback from the general public. Crowdfunding research allows the public to turn this around by enabling scientists to find support for projects currently not (or never) on the radar of conventional funding agencies, yet enjoying sufficient public interest.  This category of research is probably the most obviously deserving of crowdfunding and has already enabled a host of documentaries, research excursions, and books, often by providing exclusively ideological or intellectual reward.

Take a guess as to which industry suffered the most cybersecurity breaches in 2013.

According to one health IT startup, that’s healthcare. Protenus pointed that out at DreamIt Health Baltimore Demo Day in April.

As cofounder Robert Lord explained at Demo Day, electronic medical records, shockingly enough, “weren’t built with security in mind.”

QIAGEN N.V. (frankfurt prime standard:QIA) today announced that its therascreen® KRAS RGQ PCR Kit (therascreen KRAS test) has received U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval to guide the treatment of metastatic colorectal cancer patients with Amgen's Vectibix® (panitumumab). This marks the third FDA approval of a companion diagnostic from QIAGEN that has been paired with a novel medicine.

QIAGEN's growing menu of clinically validated companion diagnostics is driving global dissemination of personalized healthcare, which uses genomic information to guide treatment decisions in individual patients.

The DoD SBIR 2014.2 solicitation is now available for the submission of proposals.

Participating Department of Defense (DoD) agencies:

• Army
• Navy
• DARPA
• DLA
• DMEA
• Missile Defense Agency (MDA)

IMPORTANT DATES and DEADLINES

May 23, 2014
Solicitation opens and DoD begins accepting proposals
June 11, 2014
SITIS closes to new questions
June 25, 2014 6:00 am EST
Solicitation closes to receipt of proposals at 6:00 AM EST-plan ahead and submit early.

Montgomery County, taking a page from the state's playbook, has lured cybersecurity startup Mobile System 7 across state lines from McLean, Va. to Bethesda, Md. with $100,000 of investment and services according to The Washington Post. Expansion of the cybersecurity business sector has become a very high priority throughout Maryland and this is just the latest of a series of investments by the state and local governments to encourage successful cybersecurity companies to open or move businesses to Maryland.

The move is reminiscent of the way Luminal, a cybersecurity startup born in West Virginia, was enticed into moving to Frederick thanks to generous investment offers via the state government. That was state investment however, while the Mobile System 7 move comes after Montgomery County's Department of Economic Development convinced the company that it would do better in Maryland than in Virginia.

Biotech is certainly a growing industry in Greater Baltimore, and here’s more proof. These 10 companies all said they are growing their staff in the coming months, when we asked in our annual industry survey. Here are all the jobs they’re already looking to fill:

City innovation economy classifications and rankings, 2014.

World’s largest city classification and global ranking with 445 benchmark cities classified, and all cities analyst ranked this year. Measuring each cities potential as an innovation economy at the current time, since 2007.

Based on 2thinknow analyst interpretation of 162 city indicators from 2thinknow City Benchmarking Data set.

QIAGEN N.V. (NASDAQ: QGEN; Frankfurt Prime Standard: QIA) today announced the expansion of its industry-leading portfolio of bioinformatics solutions with additional content from BIOBASE, a provider of expertly curated biological databases, software and services. With access to HGMD, an especially in clinical markets widely used biomedical data resource as well as to other unique content, QIAGEN expand its world’s most comprehensive, high-quality and up-to-date literature source for clinical research and diagnosis – further strengthening its market-leading position in the analysis and interpretation of sequencing data. QIAGEN’s growing bioinformatics and next-generation sequencing (NGS) franchises is positioned to benefit from the integration of BIOBASE, its assets and employees and will benefit the expansion of relationships with thousands of clinical labs and NGS users in life sciences.

“The ability of next-generation sequencing to rapidly deliver genomic insights is opening up new frontiers for clinical research and medicine, and QIAGEN is strategically addressing customers’ needs to interpret the massive amounts of data generated by NGS. With HGMD and other content from BIOBASE, a respected organization with a dedicated team and robust line of unique databases and software, QIAGEN is further extending its competitive advantage as the overall market leader for clinical interpretation of human sequencing data,” said Peer M. Schatz, Chief Executive Officer of QIAGEN. “Already today, more than 15,000 users worldwide rely on QIAGEN’s bioinformatics products for interpretation – and have processed over a quarter of a million genome sequences. HGMD is a unique fit with our offering and will integrate well. We expect to drive additional adoption of this leading literature-based knowledge base used by clinical reference labs for annotating hereditary variants, as well as BIOBASE’ other solutions by having integrated them into interpretation solutions shared with our Ingenuity Knowledge Base – adding value for QIAGEN and BIOBASE customers and accelerating our growth drivers in NGS and bioinformatics.”

In almost every case, the scientist-entrepreneurs approaching LSN are falling victim to one or more fallacies that are propagated through the industry. LSN is in a dialogue with over 5,000 investors around the world, and the reality is that what many entrepreneurs believe to be sound business logic could be dooming their companies. This article compiles the top 10  fundraising misconceptions so that you can avoid these pitfalls.

Providing shared space, services, equipment, and expertise to budget-conscious scientist-entrepreneurs who are looking to prove a hypothesis and launch a company is the mission of life science incubators. And they have helped many start-ups.

However, increasingly, scientist-entrepreneurs are disappointed with what they’re finding. LSN hears a lot of complaints because we are in dialogue with a lot of the firms that populate these incubators. They acknowledge that incubators are less expensive than going it alone. Still, they say the lab space is too expensive, the promise of seeding seasoned players who can augment the founding team often goes unfulfilled, and there’s little to no tactical fundraising support.

Two year’s ago this month the Fourth Economy team completed an assignment for the Pennsylvania Life Science Leadership Advisory Council. At a news event in May 2012 we participated in the release of “Life Sciences Leadership for the Next Decade: Nurturing a Life Science Ecosystem for Job Creation and Economic Development in Pennsylvania”. This report highlighted five steps and related actions that the life science community could undertake to maintain the economic impact of the life science industry in the state.

Flash forward two years and we wanted to check in and see how the industry was performing in terms of employment and establishments. The following information summarizes our findings. The life science industry continues to be a strong overall sector for the state’s economy.

Engineering is a field with the power to transform lives across the globe, often in the most underserved regions. Nowhere is this maxim more apparent than at the Center for Bioengineering Innovation & Design (CBID), founded in 2007 at the Johns Hopkins University’s Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Each summer, teams of new engineering graduate students travel overseas to areas where poverty and poor healthcare dominate. They look for opportunities to put their skills to work solving difficult, and often deadly, health problems.

American entrepreneurship is apparently on the decline, according to a recent article from FiveThirtyEight, but small business owners report consistently high levels of satisfaction with their choices despite the financial difficulties that they have faced.

“Americans started 27 percent fewer businesses in 2011 than they did five years earlier, according to data from the Census Bureau,” writes Ben Casselman on FiveThirtyEight. As a share of all companies, startups have been declining for more than 30 years.”

Supernus Pharmaceuticals, Inc. today announced that United Therapeutics Corporation UTHR +0.58% has paid Supernus a $2 million milestone payment under United Therapeutics' license agreement with Supernus. This payment was due upon the launch of Orenitram™ (treprostinil) Extended-Release Tablets for the treatment of pulmonary arterial hypertension, in the United States. Orenitram™ utilizes a Supernus patented technology platform. In addition to the launch milestone, Supernus will receive royalties on net sales of Orenitram™, and may become entitled to additional milestone payments.

"We are pleased to have played a role in helping to bring Orenitram™ to patients and their physicians as an important new therapy option," said Jack A. Khattar, President and CEO of Supernus. "Over the life of the product, we expect to receive significant recurring royalty revenue from United Therapeutics' commercialization of Orenitram™."

Also this week in Pfizer-related Maryland biotech news: Gaithersburg-based GlycoMimetics Inc. collected a $15 million payment from the pharma giant stemming from its license agreement for the sickle cell anemia drug rivipansel.

GlycoMimetics in 2011 inked the Pfizer partnership, worth up to $340 million, to develop rivipansel (then just called GMI-1070) as a treatment for a complication of sickle cell disease called vaso-occlusive crisis.

The second annual InvestMaryland Challenge, an early-stage business competition of the Maryland Department of Business & Economic Development, came to an exciting close Monday evening at the National Aquarium in Baltimore.

Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, joined by DBED Secretary Dominick Murray, entrepreneurs and business leaders, applauded the winners of nearly $1 million in grants and prizes.

A health IT startup launched last year by four recent Johns Hopkins graduates and one soon-to-be JHU graduate was one of four firms to win a $100,000 top prize Monday in the InvestMaryland Challenge, a state-run competition to help promising new companies in the life sciences and high tech industries.

The competition, run by the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development, had 260 entries. Healthify took first place in the General Industry category, open to companies anywhere in the U.S. if they open a location in Maryland. Healthify, based in New York, beat out two other finalists—a wholesale food distribution website with a focus on local, sustainably-produced items; and an ad technology company.

Vinod Khosla, sassy VC and legendary co-founder of Sun Microsystems, has predicted the future of health.

In essence, he has said, our medical lives will become increasingly automated, with ultra-intelligent systems prescribing fine-grain recommendations to nurse us back to health. According to a newly released report, he predicts:

The Angel Capital Association (ACA) today launched a campaign to protect startups from a devastating loss of angel capital if the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) increases the financial qualifications for accredited investors.  The "Protect Angel Funding" initiative is a call to action to the startup ecosystem—from angel investors to economic development organizations and entrepreneurs – to urge regulators to preserve the definition of who qualifies as an accredited angel investor. Protecting this important investment class is critical to preserving the economic fuel it provides to startups and job creation. If changes proposed by "investor protection" organizations are enacted by the SEC, nearly 60 percent of angel investors would be eliminated.

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 requires the SEC to review the definition of an accredited investor in 2014 to determine whether it should be modified "for the protection of investors, in the public interest and in light of the economy."  Currently, an individual accredited investor is defined as someone with $1 million in net worth excluding the value of a primary residence, or annual income of $200,000.  At issue is whether these financial thresholds should be arbitrarily raised based on inflation. 

In the US, many entrepreneurs see grants as “free money,” since they are not loans and don’t have to be repaid. A grant is not an equity investment, so the entrepreneur doesn’t have to give up a stake in the company either. Typically they can be used to fund product development and commercialization that would otherwise require outside investors.

A good place to start looking is the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, which is a lifeline for high-tech startups. A more general approach is to check out Grants.gov, which is a searchable directory of more than 1,000 federal grant programs. An advanced search tool is provided to search for a grant by eligibility, by issuing agency, or category.

Baltimore startups were not among the winners of this year’s InvestMaryland Challenge and its more than $1 million in cash and in-kind awards.

Gov. Martin O’Malley announced the winners May 19 at an award ceremony at the National Aquarium in Baltimore. Top winners in each of the four categories receive $100,000 from the Maryland Venture Fund and BioMaryland Center, plus other in-kind prizes.

More than 250 companies applied to the competition. Four Baltimore companies — ZeroFox, Staq, Foodem.com and Light Point Security — were among a dozen finalists announced in March. Vasoptic Medical in Columbia and Dinnertime in Lutherville were also in the running.

AstraZeneca on Monday rejected a "final" $119 billion buyout offer from Pfizer, possibly sinking a pharmaceutical mega-merger that could have jeopardized jobs at AZ's Maryland subsidiary, MedImmune.

Pfizer, which would have created the world's largest drug company through the deal, on Sunday evening increased its earlier $106 billion cash-and-stock bid. In a statement, AstraZeneca Chairman Leif Johansson called that new offer "inadequate" and said it would have "serious consequences for the company, our employees and the life-sciences sector in the U.K., Sweden and the U.S."

Cybersecurity is a major growth engine in the region. Get on board by joining over 200 cyber leaders from the private, government and academic sectors at the 2014 CyberMontgomery Forum. Plus, hear a keynote address by The Honorable Thomas J. Ridge, the first Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and former two-term Governor of Pennsylvania.

Attendees will also get an update on the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence and hear from other industry experts and guest speakers including Congressmen Ben Cardin and Chris Van Hollen, Montgomery County Executive Isiah Leggett and representatives from Lockheed Martin, Discovery Communications, DMI, Triumfant, Koolspan, Inc. and many more.

Pharmaceutical behemoths New York-based Pfizer and London-based AstraZeneca are waging a trans-Atlantic battle over a potential multibillion-dollar buyout that has put both companies and their respective governments on the defensive.

The kerfuffle raises questions about the future of 3,100 scientists and manufacturers employed in the Maryland offices of MedImmune, a biotechnology company that local officials worry could be gutted if its corporate parent, AstraZeneca, gets bought.

Pfizer has again raised its offer for AstraZeneca, making what it said was a final effort to bring the giant British drug maker to the negotiating table.

The latest offer, made Sunday evening, is worth about $119 billion. It comes after AstraZeneca’s rejection of several private and public offers from Pfizer.

University of Maryland is well-known across the nation and internationally as a forward-thinking research institution, which is why it wasn't too surprising to hear that UMD is now home to one of the nation's fastest university-owned supercomputers.

Put simply, the supercomputer going by the name of Deepthought2 (appropriate, eh?) will help to support advanced, high-performance computing and research with the ability to do things like simulate fire and combustion. The contraption has a processing speed of about 300 teraflops, which is crazy fast. How fast? Absurdly speedy.

Research labs closed by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer dot the country: Illinois. Michigan. New Jersey. New York. North Carolina.

Maryland officials don't want this state to join that list.

After Pfizer declared its desire to buy AstraZeneca — which employs 3,100 in the state — Gov. Martin O'Malley and six members of Maryland's congressional delegation fired off concerned letters, even though the purchase is by no means a done deal. So far, London-based AstraZeneca has rebuffed its New York suitor.

Johns Hopkins announced on May 6 its plans to build a new cancer treatment building in Baltimore. The facility will be constructed with the help of a $65 million gift. It will be named after the late Albert P. “Skip” Viragh, Jr., a philanthropist and a former cancer patient treated at Johns Hopkins, who died in 2003, at the age of 62.

The Skip Viragh Outpatient Cancer Building is scheduled for completion in 2017. It will be constructed on the southeast corner of Fayette Street and North Broadway, in East Baltimore, and will feature about 50 exam rooms, advanced cancer imaging, a specially designed cancer diagnostic and treatment planning center, and many other facilities and services.

Translating Ideas from Bench to Bedside

June 3rd, 2014, from 6 to 8:30 pm  

Krieger School of Arts and Sciences Advanced Academic Programs   

Johns Hopkins University Montgomery County Campus, Rockville, MD   9601 Medical Center Drive (A&R Building, Room 106-110)

Connect with physician entrepreneurs and other stakeholders in healthcare innovation as we explore the winning formula for successfully advancing new medical devices and technology to commercialization.

AstraZeneca's boss said on Wednesday he would engage with Pfizer if the price was right and the risks posed from forcing the British drugmaker's operations into the U.S. company's new three-unit model were addressed.

Chief Executive Pascal Soriot stressed his company had a bright future as a stand-alone firm but acknowledged that shareholders would expect AstraZeneca's board to negotiate if terms were sufficiently attractive in a sweetened offer.

The Tech Council of Maryland (TCM), Maryland’s largest technology trade association for life science and technology, today announced the winners of its 26th Annual Industry Awards. More than 700 technology and business leaders from around the state attended the celebration last night, which took place at the Bethesda North Marriott Hotel & Conference Center.

“The individuals and companies we honored at last night’s industry awards celebration represent the tremendous talent, innovation and dedication we have in Maryland’s thriving technology community,” said Phil Schiff, TCM’s CEO. “The nominees for this year’s awards were truly outstanding, and exemplify how Maryland’s technology community is playing a vital role in ensuring our state’s long-term prosperity.”